Deeplinks Blog posts about Security

Hours ago, the House of Representatives voted to approve the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a bill that would allow companies to bypass all existing privacy law to spy on communications and pass sensitive user data to the government. EFF condemns the vote in the House and vows to continue the fight in the Senate.

"As the Senate takes up the issue of cybersecurity in the coming weeks, civil liberties will be a central issue. We must do everything within our power to safeguard the privacy rights of individual Internet users and ensure that Congress does not sacrifice those rights in a rush to pass vaguely-worded cybersecurity bills," said Lee Tien, EFF Senior Staff Attorney.

This week, a flurry of amendments were introduced to try to salvage the Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a “cybersecurity” bill moving through the house that’s been criticized as giving companies free rein to spy on personal communications and pass unredacted content (like emails) to the government. Though numerous amendments were suggested, a package of five amendments were put together by the bill’s primary author Mike Rogers (R-MI) and are likely to get accepted without much debate. Below is an overview of what’s in the Rogers package and how it fails to address the grave civil liberties concerns inherent in CISPA.

The House of Representatives kicked off their “cybersecurity week” yesterday with a hearing titled "America Is Under Cyber Attack: Why Urgent Action is Needed." Needless to say, the rhetoric of fear was in full force. A lot of topics were raised by members of Congress and panelists, but perhaps the most troublesome theme came from panelist and Former Executive Assistant Director of the FBI Shawn Henry, who repeatedly urged that good cybersecurity means going on the offensive:

“the problem with existing [...] tactics is that they are too focused on adversary tools (malware and exploits) and not on who the adversary is and how they operate. Ultimately, until we focus on the enemy and take the fight to them […], we will fail.”

The House of Representatives is now poised to vote on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which would allow companies to monitor our online communications and share private information about users with the government.

CISPA would let companies bypass all existing privacylaw as long as they claim a "good faith" belief that they are doing so for cybersecurity purposes. These exemptions would allow a huge trove of data to end up in the government's hands with no judicial oversight.

House leadership is pushing for a vote on CISPA this week. Please call your Representative now and urge them not to sacrifice the civil liberties of Internet users in the name of cybersecurity legislation.

The campaign of attacks targeting Syrian opposition activists on the Internet continues to intensify. Since the beginning of the year, Syrian opposition activists have been targeted using severalTrojans, which covertly install spying software onto the infected computer, as well as phishing attacks which steal YouTube and Facebook login credentials.